The Art Book Prize

Administered by the Authors’ Club in association with the Whitechapel Gallery, the Art Book Prize (formerly the Banister Fletcher Art and Architecture Book of the Year) is presented each year for the ‘book most deserving on architecture or the arts’ (architecture, fine art, painting, sculpture, photography, graphic art, design etc).

The book must have been published in the previous calendar year, with a preferred emphasis on works illuminating art for the intelligent lay reader, and which themselves embody a high standard of art direction and design. Books may be entered by publishers, authors or agents.

Recent winners have included Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945–1975, by Elain Harwood (Yale University Press); The Making of Assisi by Donal Cooper and Janet Robson (Yale University Press); Art in Oceania: A New History, by Peter Brunt, Nicholas Thomas, Deidre Brown et al. (Thames & Hudson); and Architecture in Uniform: Design and Building for the Second World War, by Jean-Louis Cohen (Editions Hazan);

Banister Fletcher prizewinners

2010: David King, Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union